By PETER CALDER
"Welcome to the glamorous world of magazine publishing," says Linda Clark, less apologetically than self-effacingly as she meets me at her office door.
It's a room less glossy than gloomy, scarcely bigger than a decent billiard table and with a fabulous view of the two-storey concrete-block wall of a tyre dealership. There's barely room for the two of us and a photographer's lens at the small round table in the corner.
This may be the office of the new editor of the glossy monthly magazine grace and the former political editor of Television New Zealand, but there's nothing very glamorous - or even that graceful - about it.
But if she has come down in the world, Clark doesn't seem to have noticed. The 24th issue of grace, the first under her stewardship, hits the newsstands on Monday, and she's buzzing as she flicks through its pages.
"It's not a 'girly' magazine," she says, running her hand over the cover shot - a 5cm-deep set of coral-pink whispering lips.
"It doesn't have a nice young thing smiling on the cover because shots like that don't say a lot to me."
I'm scarcely surprised that she bristles and rolls her eyes when I suggest that an intelligent women's magazine is a contradiction in terms. Don't intelligent women read intelligent magazines, I wonder? The Spectator, for example, or New Scientist?
"I firmly believe women do not define themselves by their gender any more," she says (though whether that proves or disproves my theory is hard to fathom). "Women's magazines with a girly girl on the cover and every story about women who have got interesting jobs are a thing of the past."
The June issue's profile (written by the editor) is of Attorney-General Margaret Wilson but next month's subject is a man, she says. She has more male columnists than before, and the travel and cooking are gender-neutral.
And she's impressed one of the country's top photographers, who told me yesterday that she rang him to talk about how pictures could be shot and used.
"I've shot for most magazines and it's the first time an editor has done that," he said.
These are all signs of a magazine searching for a niche in a crowded and competitive market. grace launched two years ago, peaked at more than 25,000 circulation in its first few months, but has slumped through 19,000 to 16,000.
Clark is under no illusions about the task she faces, but says she's up against competition which varies from the preachy and the dour to the mindless or the macho, and she's hoping the balance between brain and body will work.
It's a radical departure for the former political journalist who was the face of One News' nightly dispatches from the corridors of power. Clark says she simply "got over" political journalism.
"I knew I was getting sick of it, and I wanted to get out of it before I was. I got sick of the grind, the long days and the fact that you can never switch off. The logistics of covering that beat are enormous. You have to be hyper-organised all the time and I was just tired."
She still has Face the Nation, the Thursday night interview programme that had its second outing this week. She opened with a blinder - getting the Prime Minister, the Acting Police Commissioner and the Race Relations Conciliator singing in harmony amid the discord left by the police shooting of Steve Wallace in Waitara.
This week's seemed flatter and more lacklustre as strategists for Labour, the Alliance and the Greens moved warily around one another in a half-hour discussion about how the Coalition is coalescing.
Yet the absence of conflict, of posing and posturing, made the programme oddly absorbing; perhaps it's a comment on our expectations of television that a shortage of histrionics make us think it's fallen flat.
"What we're trying to do," says the host, "is have constructive discussions. I can shriek down the best of them, but there's not much point unless you're provoked. You don't get anywhere or cast much light."
For all that she's a magazine editor now, Clark loves television, and won't have a bar of the writer's sneering that it's superficial.
"It's democratic," says the veteran of several print jobs including the National Business Review and the now-defunct New Zealand Times. "When I broke good stories for the NBR, the only people who were reading them were rich business people. They knew more about who I was writing about than I did.
"In television, the information is so much more useful because everyone has access to it. It's free. They don't even know they're taking it in half the time. You can give the poorest person in Otahuhu the same information as a captain of industry."
The news reporter became the news more than once, spectacularly when then-PM Jenny Shipley's offhand comment about having made up the figure TVNZ paid John Hawkesby became the biggest nail in the rather well-studded coffin of National's re-election campaign.
Earlier, when Michael Laws' book The Demon Profession quoted someone questioning her political impartiality, she sued and had the offending paragraphs stickered over. It earned her her fair share of ribbing from colleagues who believed that journalists who give it out all the time should be able to take it, but she is unrepentant.
"I don't think we should be able to take a lie," she says. "There was a lie in that book. I signed a contract giving an undertaking that I would be politically neutral."
She doesn't pretend neutrality means freedom from attitude, but says broadcaster are bound by an act that requires even-handedness.
"At that time and with that act hanging over your head, you had to take allegations of lack of neutrality very seriously indeed." In any event, allegiance, even opinions, vaporise in the furnace of day-to-day political journalism, says Clark.
"The problem with being in the [parliamentary press] gallery is that it neutralises your political viewpoint. Over time it gets eroded and you end up seeing much less value in everything because your whole job is to find the flaw in everything."
The hiring of television stars to be the editors - and the public faces - of magazines is a well-established tradition in Northern Hemisphere markets and Clark is ready for it, although she resists any suggestion that a cult of personality is at work here.
"I'm sure one of the reasons they wanted me is because I was a name, but I don't want to be a celebrity.
"Sure, there's a part of anyone who goes into this business that demands external reassurance. We've all got the black hole that needs to be filled, and most people say nice things when they stop you in the street.
"But I don't want the celebrity that goes with the big billboards. I'm happy to have a television show that starts at 9.30 at night. I don't want to do the interviews in the women's magazines. If you had asked me personal questions about my life and my family I would have deferred."
The new job forced a move to Auckland, but Clark is not complaining.
"I love Auckland," she says, then covers her mouth with her hand, shocked at the treason of the utterance. "You're not allowed to say that, are you? You're supposed to love Wellington forever. But there are nine steps to my house and it's warm here, even in winter. These are unimagined delights."
<i>Calder at large:</i> Down-market to a state of grace
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